Just a blogger. Since 2003.

Menu

AP: Economy “recovering”, but unemployed giving up on the job market in droves

The whole article paints a distinctly dismal picture of what the job market looks like right now, but the Associated Press still manages to twist the state of unemployment affairs and the jobs situation as a “recovery”, an “improving economy” (bolded emphasis added by me):

WASHINGTON – After a full year of fruitless job hunting, Natasha Baebler just gave up.

She’d already abandoned hope of getting work in her field, working with the disabled. But she couldn’t land anything else, either — not even a job interview at a telephone call center.

Until she feels confident enough to send out resumes again, she’ll get by on food stamps and disability checks from Social Security and live with her parents in St. Louis.

“I’m not proud of it,” says Baebler, who is in her mid-30s and is blind. “The only way I’m able to sustain any semblance of self-preservation is to rely on government programs that I have no desire to be on.”

Baebler’s frustrating experience has become all too common nearly four years after the Great Recession ended: Many Americans are still so discouraged that they’ve given up on the job market.

Older Americans have retired early. Younger ones have enrolled in school. Others have suspended their job hunt until the employment landscape brightens. Some, like Baebler, are collecting disability checks.

It isn’t supposed to be this way. After a recession, an improving economy is supposed to bring people back into the job market.

Instead, the number of Americans in the labor force — those who have a job or are looking for one — fell by nearly half a million people from February to March, the government said Friday. And the percentage of working-age adults in the labor force — what’s called the participation rate — fell to 63.3 percent last month. It’s the lowest such figure since May 1979.

The falling participation rate tarnished the only apparent good news in the jobs report the Labor Department released Friday: The unemployment rate dropped to a four-year low of 7.6 percent in March from 7.7 in February.

People without a job who stop looking for one are no longer counted as unemployed. That’s why the U.S. unemployment rate dropped in March despite weak hiring. If the 496,000 who left the labor force last month had still been looking for jobs, the unemployment rate would have risen to 7.9 percent in March.

Unfortunately, there are many more like Baebler who have been searching longer, whose unemployment ran out from not being able to find anything they can make a decent living off of. And many who have found something in the meantime have found that their wages have decreased sharply from the last time they worked, because skilled workers and unskilled workers alike are so desperate for work in some cases they’ll take anything – sometimes two and three jobs – in order to try and make ends meet. Others can’t afford to take those low-paying jobs for various reasons, and it’s just getting worse.

How AP can spin this economy as “improving”, and the fact that the percentage of unemployment went down .1 percent in an article that talks about how so many have dropped out of the job market is beyond me, but then again, we are talking about a news outlet who, along with many others the last several years of the Obama administration, have consistently reported on bad monthly economic news as “unexpected”, so I guess I shouldn’t be too surprised.

In any event, not to be a Debbie Downer on this beautiful Sunday, but there you go. In spite of what the mainstream media – and this administration and all the liars in it – want you to believe otherwise, we are really in a wreckovery – not a “recovery” – and with the full impact of the mammoth legislation of ObamaCare starting to take effect nationwide, expect more of the same in the months to come as employers continue to desperately try to make profits and keep people employed while wrestling with the realities of what their bottom line can and cannot handle financially as a result of this administration’s extreme anti-business bias.

It is what it is – I hope I end up being wrong about what I believe the future holds for the job market, job seekers, and employers, but I fear I am not. Time will tell.

Post navigation

4 thoughts on “AP: Economy “recovering”, but unemployed giving up on the job market in droves”

But Obama and his Democrats assured all of us that massive deficit spending would cause the economy to “boom”!

But on a lighter note, perhaps the economy continuing to tank will result in dwindling profits at the AP, NYT, MSNBC, NBC, ABC, and CBS and they’ll be forced to lay off a portion of their “journalists”. It would be poetic justice for the propaganda they been peddling, instead of real facts, for Obama and the Democratic Party.

@Tex–My sentiments exactly. Just because some poor misguided soul draws a paycheck from AP, a.k.a. American Pravda, it does not translate that the rest of us enjoy the luxury of employment. Some fields of endeavor require one to lower their standards, assuming they had any in the first place. As Dryden penned:

“I can enjoy her while she’s kind;
But when she dances in the wind,
And shakes the wings, and will not stay,
I puff the prostitute away.”

After a recession, an improving economy is supposed to bring people back into the job market.

Well, duh!! So the logical conclusion – unless you’re a drone ‘reporter’ for the AP, is that we do not have an improving economy.

And that’s true no matter how often King Putt or any of his minions chant the line of horse-hockey about how many wonderful things they’ve done for the economy, and if you don’t believe it, then shut up, raaaacist!

As pointed out by Brenda Buttner on FNC, just to “maintain” in our economy for the increase in population we would have to have an increase of 100,000 jobs a week. That would result in the same percentage of people working and not working week-to-week. When’s the last time 100,000 jobs were added to the labor market in three or four consecutive weeks?

The LSM has become such a clown shill for the administration, it would be amusing were it not so tragic for the tens of thousands of families and individuals so adversely affected by the pure malevolence of the marxists running the country, and their enablers.